This book, written in 1979-1982, on the young Hitler in Vienna is partially based on highly unreliable witness accounts (Reinhold Hanisch and Josef Greiner), on unreliable Hitler biographies (from Werner Maser, John Toland and Robert G.L. Waite) and on information reached to him by nazi art swindlers Dr. Johannes von Müllern-Schönhausen and Prof. Dr. August Priesack.

On the other hand, J. Sydney Jones did research in German, Austrian and US archives and interviewed reliable witnesses. He has provided this work with excellent references on sources, which makes it possible, with the knowledge of 35 years hindsight, to distinguish concoctions from facts in this work.

J. Sydney Jones has interwoven the story on Hitler with chapters on Hitler's contemporaries in Vienna, like the painters Gerstl, Klimt, Kokoschka, the composer Mahler and the architects Loos and Otto Wagner.
He also paid much attention to Hitler's supposed sex life, including golden showers and so on.

As our investigation focuses on the artwork attributed to Hitler, we investigated only the relevant passages in J. Sydney Jones' book.

In Adolf Hitler als Maler und Zeichner (1983), the book Priesack was working on, on pages 103 'these' the four test drawings are depicted, preceded by this text:Price 40PB: D1; F : P = Privatbesitz; Privatsammlung in Südwestdeutschland, Fotoquelle, Bildarchiv Dr. Priesack, München.
The provenance story tells us Price 40 is very likely to be a forgery.

Price 41PB: D1; F : P = Privatbesitz; Privatsammlung in Südwestdeutschland, Fotoquelle, Bildarchiv Dr. Priesack, München.
The provenance story tells us Price 41 is very likely to be a forgery.

Price 42PB: D1; F : P = Privatbesitz; Privatsammlung in Südwestdeutschland, Fotoquelle, Bildarchiv Dr. Priesack, München.
The provenance story tells us Price 42 is very likely to be a forgery.

Price 43PB: D1; F : P = Privatbesitz; Privatsammlung in Südwestdeutschland, Fotoquelle, Bildarchiv Dr. Priesack, München.
The provenance story tells us Price 43 is very likely to be a forgery.

Price 44PB: E; F : J = Privatbesitz; Privatsammlung Marquess of Bath, Longleat House, England; Fotoquelle ; Peter Jahn Wien.The provenance story tells us Price 44 is very likely to be a forgery. As the marquess of Bath possessed a large collection of forged Hitlers and Peter Jahn was a notorius swindler.

4 Hitler, Mein Kampf, page 205 Quoted in Maser, p. 356, n. 5. 6 To be fair to Hitler, at least one other of the applicants who failed that year went on to become a professor at the same Academy (Maser, p. 40). Toland points out (p. 25) that Marc Chagall was rejected by the St. Petersburg Academy. Though this is not to suggest that Hitler's talent was misunderstood genius. Few drawings exist from these early years, but those that do remain show a somewhat unskilled hand at wok on paintings, primarily architectural in nature, and in the style of Rudolph van Alt, an Austrian master. (...) But the rejection from the academy did not mean, per se, that Hitler was without talent. 7 Maser, p. 40.

notes:1 Altenberg Statement, HA, File 1741, Reel 86.
This might be the statement of Altenberg, deposited at the Viennese police in 1935, in the police investigation into Hitler forgeries by Reinhold Hanisch.

Page 316-318, notes 2 and 3 by page 199-200. Is this the source for the Hitler-the-house-painter myth?

318

The frame maker Jacob Altenberg (name also spelled as 'Jakob Altenberg', 1875-1944) was one of the buyers of Hitlers paintings in 1910-1913.

Altenberg himself stated that he had bought 25 Hitler paintings.

Yet, in the Price book his name as original owner is only mentioned twice. With these two works, Price-263 'Penzing - St. Rochus Kapelle 1912' and 'Price-264, 'Wien 1912 I. B(ez.) Ruprechtskirche 1912'.

If these works depicted in Price (albeit with very strange dates of the statements by Altenberg, are really the same as the ones once owned by Altenberger, these works must be authentic Hitlers.

Avccording to Price they were in 1981 in the possession of Graf Klenau in München.